


gimme shelter

by auxanges



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Anal Sex, Fantasy Fulfillment, Humanstuck, M/M, Riding, Underage Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-27 14:56:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20047918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxanges/pseuds/auxanges
Summary: Eridan has rowing practice.His brother—his dickhead, loudmouth, broad-chested, woke-up-like-this rake of a brother, regular star of your wet dreams for the past nine years, does not.





	gimme shelter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lizardlicks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lizardlicks/gifts).

> "Karkat has had an inadvisable (hate?) crush on his best friend's older brother for years and he suddenly finds himself with several hours of uninterrupted alone time with Cronus. What's a guy to do but get some good dick?"
> 
> i dont talk enough about how good crokat is. all of these prompts were so good it really was the Sophie's Choice of which one to write, if sophie had to pick between the same dicks in different scenarios
> 
> EDIT: [there is art](https://twitter.com/siggykuu/status/1164070987115220992) [of this fic!](https://twitter.com/siggykuu/status/1164135238588665856) thank you so much siggy! <3  
EDIT 2 (THE SECOND ONE): thank you [crabbyfins](https://crabbyfins.tumblr.com/post/187216735369/you-pour-yourself-another-cup-of-coffee-you-can) for the fanart!!

You meet Cronus in his dad’s garage fucking around with a bike. You’re on the cusp of thirteen, the thick blanket of summer stretched over your neighbourhood. He’s nineteen and, you are told, full of terrible decisions. If you had a nickel for every time Eridan relayed a narrow escape his brother had or a broken bone he collected, you could pay the guy some therapy. 

But curiosity is your greatest vice, egged on by hormones: fists jammed in your pockets, you scuff your shoes and break the ice. 

“You ride?”

It’s hard to even pretend to be casual—he’s got a clunky radio blasting loudly enough to shake the shelves while he mumbles Rolling Stones lyrics under his breath. At your shouted inquiry, though, he looks up. 

“Nope,” says Cronus. “Just like keeping my hands busy.” 

And he winks at you. 

Under your mop of hair, your ears are burning. “Okay,” you say, like a brain-dead pissant, like a real live aphasic man-baby.

“Okay,” he parrots, turning back to the bike. There is grease all the way up to his wrists, what the fuck. 

Eridan calls you in for your study session, and you find yourself glancing back between bars of bass you can feel in your shoes. Cronus has raised his voice, maybe only in your imagination. 

_It’s just a kiss away, it’s just a kiss away._

* * *

You’re still thinking of him a week later, behind your closed door and under your thinnest sheets. All the windows are open, letting in dense air and cricket song. You wrap unpracticed fingers around yourself and call to mind Cronus’ hands, peeling away the chain grease and grainy filters of memory.

You bet they’re rough. Eridan’s got rough hands and you know damn well he gets manicures, so you can’t imagine his delinquent asshole of a blood relative is working with anything particularly baby-smooth. Plus, you saw his guitars in the den. He’s gotta have hard fingertips. 

And it’s easy, to imagine them trailing along your side, over the crux of your hip down to your dick. To imagine the practice he must have, working someone open, taking them apart like some stupid project in his father’s garage. 

Your thoughts snowball—Cronus getting you off, Cronus laughing like you’re a child, Cronus getting _himself_ off, Cronus moaning your name in his smoker’s baritone with every squeeze, _Karkat_—

You come too fast, all at once in a hot and sticky and terrible mess with your teeth digging into the knuckles of your free hand. In your mind’s eye, he licks the blood from your lips and skin, and you want to die just a teeny bit. 

Dragging yourself free from bed, you sit on the shower floor for forty-five minutes until your back is traffic-light-red, and resolve to do yourself and the world a favour—grow some fucking balls already and forget about him.

* * *

Of course you don’t forget about Cronus. He’s in your brain like some icky farmer-tanned parasite, following you through high school and well into your undergrad. It’s a wonder you’ve never stooped to doodling his name in your notebooks. (Your Theology 1010 class freshman year involved a couple interesting trains of thought, though.)

You’re twenty-two and your decisions are, well, poor. They’re poorer than a Dickensian urchin tapping a tin cup against the bars of sexual frustration. The cup is you, empty of what your subconscious has decided it still wants, even after years of the other part of your subconscious trying to tell you you don’t need. 

“One more hour, Kar. Can your tiny bladder handle it?”

You elbow Eridan in his gear-shifting arm. “The only thing I can’t handle on this road trip are your movie score playlists. That shit puts me out faster than Nyquil, how are you, like, alive?”

“Pure skill,” he replies with a brief smile at the truck in front of you. 

It’s reading week. Neither of you ever really do much reading over the breaks—you did all yours the week prior, and Eridan’s freak memory absorbed half his syllabus like a sponge and hid the rest in the couch cushions or something—instead packing your shit and driving the six hours back to your hometown.

Fifty-seven minutes later your bladder begs for mercy; you stumble out of the car the minute you pull into the Amporas’ driveway and open the door out of entitled habit. You round the corner of the hall to the bathroom and immediately crash into someone. 

“Oh, hey, Karkat. Where’s the fire?” 

Cronus is twenty-eight and fills his shirts and the gaps in your remembrances with irritating ease. He’s gotten a couple extra tattoos since your last visit and a few more rough-ups to match; his hair’s curling at his nape in rebellion against his gel; he’s grinning at you and you’re amazed you can’t hear your pants tighten. 

“Hold that thought,” you grit, eloquently, and lock yourself in the bathroom. 

The fancy tile is cold on your feet, and you dip your head in your hands and silently plead your case to whatever toilet god is listening. 

You’ve got it bad for your best friend’s brother. No, _bad _is for kindergarten crushes. You have the End Days of feelings explosions for Cronus and his stupid winks, his barely-there five-o’clock shadow when he’s too lazy to give a fuck, the brush of his teeth against his lips when he whistles—

“Real fuckin chivalrous, Vantas, grab your half a gear you lazy shit.” 

Eridan’s muffled voice rouses you and you return the banter loudly enough to kill your boner.

* * *

After a dinner that makes your mug-menu dorm meals look like peasant sludge, Eridan bows out for rowing practice. Never mind that it’s off-season and that the lake is freezing.

“Sure you don’t wanna come?” he asks anyway, just to antagonize you. He’s wearing long johns and a scarf, for Christ’s sake. 

“I prefer my dick not snapping off like a celery stick in a liquid nitrogen bath, actually.”

He snorts. “Your loss. We both know you’re just friends with me for my body.”

Yeah, the disturbing family resemblance is a can of worms you’re leaving unopened and shelved to collect ‘don’t think about it too hard’ dust. “It’s definitely not for your personality, which sank to the bottom of the lake years ago.”

Eridan flips you the bird. 

The door closing behind him makes your heart somersault with a sudden realization, though. Your mouth is dry like you’re naked at a middle school talent show and the faculty are armed with tomatoes.

Eridan has rowing practice. 

His brother—his dickhead, loudmouth, broad-chested, woke-up-like-this rake of a brother, regular star of your wet dreams for the past nine years, does not.

* * *

Cronus’ bedroom is a repurposed section of the basement covered in record sleeves and short-lived Broadway flop Playbills. (He’s never been to a show, he just collects them. You found this out in year three of Karkat’s Lifetime of Pubescent Pining and Subsequent Martyrdom.) There’s a cabinet or two for his father’s shit while Cronus travels, but the space is very much his. 

Proof of this is the way you find him: sprawled on his bed with his legs spread and his knees bent while he flips through Reddit on his phone. You couldn’t have painted a more vivid picture of your fantasies if you had a 64-pack of Crayola watercolours, which you’re not sure are a thing anyway. 

Back to Cronus. He’s pulled out one earbud after noticing you loitering in the doorway, sitting up with an easy smile. “Welcome back. You weren’t real chatty at dinner, were ya?” 

“I’m not chatty.” 

“And I’m not banned from three bars in Halifax,” he replies, “but neither of those things are the point of your visit.”

You extract your bottom lip from its mysterious sudden position under your canine. “No, it’s not.” 

The smile on Cronus’ face widens. “You’ve gotten bolder in college, I like it.” 

(There goes your bottom lip again, just really making itself a home wedged between your teeth.)

“So what can I do for you, chief?”

_Me. _“Me,” you say.

GOD. DAMN IT.

Cronus’ eyebrows shoot into his hair. It’s an impressive feat, because his bangs are gelled to high heaven and a calling card from Halifax Bar Number Two intersects his right eyebrow. “Well, then,” he replies, a good deal softer and just roughly enough for your jeans to tighten, “you certain that’s what you’re lookin for, Karkat?” 

“I’m chatting up a fucking typhoon wanting in your britches and you’re asking for written specifics? _You?_”

He tosses his phone aside and grins. It’s a little crooked, and a lot entrancing. “Point taken. Let’s see those britches we’re workin with, shall we?” 

That’s consent if you’ve ever heard it. Thirteen-year-old you’s junk would probably explode on sight. 

He reaches for your pants and you smack his hand away like a contradictory little shitheel. Cronus blinks, then laughs. It warms the bare strip of skin poking out from the hem of your shirt. “Go on, then. You obviously don’t need my help.” 

But God, do you need _him._ You need his hands on you with nothing in the way, especially not shit as mundane as jeans. You wrestle out of them, trying to find a pace that doesn’t seem as thirsty as you feel. 

“Eager beaver,” Cronus comments.

Okay, fuck it. 

You straddle him, brace both hands on his shoulders and crush your mouth to his. 

Beavers have dick-all on your eagerness levels. 

* * *

You hate to admit it, but a little part of you had kind of hoped that Cronus would end up being a bad kisser. Maybe then you would be able to convince yourself of the futility of your long-suffering crush and be cured of it like some horny biblical leper.

But no. Cronus’ mouth is practiced against yours, his tongue brushing the sensitive swell of your lip that you bit earlier. Everything is so hard. In multiple and increasingly literal ways. 

“You gonna let me touch you or what?” he asks, and fuck, you want to wrap yourself in his voice, you want to be this wannabe’s fucking soundboard to the universe. You’ve wanted it since you knew what it was to want.

“Yes,” you say, and you learn just how hard his fingertips are. 

He does away with the rest of your clothes, his nails tracing the lines of your body in the wake of the fabric. You feel more than exposed; you feel _seen_ in a way that your dumbshit romantic hell mind and its teen fantasies could never have prepared you for. When Cronus tugs off his clothes to drop beside his bed, it’s all you can do to keep your jaw from dropping. 

But then Cronus says, “Goddamn, Karkat, you’re a lovely sight, ain’t you.” 

The next kiss is hard enough to send you both back against the sheets. 

You’re too busy rutting against him to pay much attention to his fumbling for lube. You tear the condom he tosses you with your teeth, and are rewarded with a whistle and a twitch of his cock under you, fuck yeah. When you roll it down the length of him, Cronus lets out the prettiest moan you’ve ever heard, woefully short as he tries to cut himself off. 

He tosses you the lube, next, and then there’s a few minutes of laboured silence, of breaths heavy with anticipation and the strain of your thighs as you work yourself open. 

Cronus stares at you like you’re God. God fucking wishes he was you right now. 

“You waiting for the Second Coming or what?”

“Let’s start with the first coming and go from there,” you snap. 

Cronus laughs again, which is a little arrogant for your taste. It’s also hot, because you have lost control of your life. 

You lean back and slowly — too slowly, you’ve waited too long but why start rushing now? — lower yourself onto him. 

Christ, he fills you like you’re nothing. He watches you settle around him, kind of swirling your hips as you mentally kick your lungs back into action. 

“Holy shit, champ,” he breathes. 

“Uh-huh,” you manage. Not quite sure what you mean by that, but neither of you care at this point. Not when Cronus remembers he can move, too. 

His hips swing in an unhurried lull. In your mind, you had pictured him pounding into you with whatever fever had been in you that particular night; here, he finds the pieces where you meet and coaxes whimpers from you like you’re one of those guitars you saw. He plucks all your strings, steel, nylon, nerve ending. 

“Please,” you say, as if he isn’t giving you everything you want. As if Cronus’ hands, halfway up your rib cage to cradle your gasps in his broad palms, aren’t driving you to give in to him. As if you aren’t digging half-moons into the soft skin of his waist like he’s the only thing tethering you. As if this could be anything but the sum of all your desires since you learned what desire had the potential to be. 

Cronus picks up the pace, at some point, and you match him, because you’re not a pansy and because you’re not about to be bested by him. You pick yourself up and lower yourself down for emphasis, hissing between your teeth and catching his oaths on the same inhale. His curls have come undone, somewhere, framing the need in his eyes. 

And that’s what hammers it home for you—he needs this as much as you do. This isn’t some isolated rose-coloured ideal (well, as ideal as Cronus Ampora can be, you guess), you’re not stroking yourself blind in your dorm room. Cronus’ gaze is intense, and heavy with sex, but it’s focused on you. 

You feel more than seen. You feel understood. 

“—nus, _Cronus_—” you try, when his hips stutter and your legs all but seize, and you spill on his stomach like a tool. 

All he does is reward you with a choke of that same harmless laughter, running his hands over yours and squeezing hard through his climax. The bones in your hands protest, but you don’t give a solitary shit. 

The walls in his room return to their right angles, and the ringing in your ears subsides enough to hear your own laughter, high and a tiny bit wheezy, how awful.

“Cute.”

Okay, maybe not _too_ awful. 

He helps you off his dick, which, in your giddiness, you almost accidentally call gentlemanly. It is pretty chivalrous of him to clear off to let you use the basement shower first, though, and it’s downright princely of him to press a chaste kiss to your temple as you slide off the bed and stumble to the bathroom. 

“I appreciate the sentiment, Vantas, but it’s a little late to cover your ass _now_, all things considered.” 

Yeah, princely is probably accurate.

* * *

Cronus ends up lending you shorts. They’re roomy and have the Queen logo on one of the cheeks, but your jeans turned out to be, uh, compromised in your excitement. You wriggle back into your shirt and put on some coffee while Cronus sits on the back porch for a smoke.

Neither of you say much; neither of you has to. It’s not awkward, and it’s not regrettable. It’s your first day of the break, after all. Why set expectations now when it’s clear you’re just going to blow them out of the water later?

(“Blowing, hey?” “Do not fucking test your luck, Ampora.”)

Eridan shoulders open the door some forty minutes later, raising an eyebrow at the two of you polishing off the pressed coffee and scrolling through your phones. “No house fires in my absence?” 

“Ye of little faith,” you reply. 

Cronus says, “You smell like fish.” 

“You certain? Here, have another whiff.” Eridan tosses a shoe at him. Cronus ducks, and his brother rolls his eyes, hoisting his bag. “Whatever. I’m gonna shower.”

“Use the upstairs one,” you and Cronus say at the same time. 

Eridan pauses, one hand on the door to the basement. “Oh….kay.” 

“Your good shampoo’s there, anyway,” you point out. “Since you don’t believe in four-in-one washes like the rest of us normal college folk.” 

“I spend four nights a week in fish pee, Kar. Four-in-one don’t cut it.” 

Eridan steals a swig from your mug, then bends to pick up his shoe. He smacks Cronus on the shoulder with it, who winks and hands him a fiver. 

You stare at them. 

Eridan waggles his eyebrows before smacking your ass, right on the Queen logo. “Finish your coffee, Kar, before I get back an finish it for you.” 

Cronus laughs and puts his earbuds back in. 

Ten minutes later, Mr. Ampora gets home, takes one look at you, and sighs and gives Cronus five dollars. 

You stand to put on more coffee. You're gonna need it.


End file.
